I think there are really two issues here. First is people who have an idea they want to present, but that idea either doesn't fit the charter of any particular working group (or they don't know about such a working group), or else said working group's schedule is too full with existing work. The only way they can do this, is to "schedule" some bar bof, and hope the right people come and listen. For these people, the larger the audience, the better. The other kind is people with just a topic they think something should be done about. In that case, they really want to find a small group of people who may be passionate about the topic, and think of ideas about what the IETF can do here. The second group are the candidates for the classic bar BoF, whether it is held in an actual bar, in the hallways of the meeting venue, or in a meeting room but the classroom-style arrangement of the chairs there is not so great. I think the best way to schedule one of those is to send a message to the attendee list (or the IETF list) saying "I'd like to get together to talk about this-or-that. Anybody who's interested, please email me off-line". Requiring an email sets the bar for participation just high enough that the people who just want to read their email won't come. Then this organizer can see how many people are interested, and find the appropriate venue based on that, informing them by private email. What we really should be thinking about, is what to do with the first group. They are likely to have a presentation, so they need a meeting room, and they do want a large audience (so maybe someone there says, "I think we can do this at so-and-so WG". One idea may be to allocate a fair-sized room for this purpose (something like Berlin in the MECC) and allocate the time there in 30-minute chunks, of which no more than half is the presentation, and the rest is time for questions. The list of topics would not be moderated, unless there are so many of them, that they won't fit, and the list, including a timetable can be published, with slots taken on a first-come-first-served basis. This way, the presenter can avoid having conflicts between their presentation and some session where all the people they want are attending. Just a thought. There are probably other ways to do this. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf